My Experement

Hypothesis

If one wants to keep their stuff on the internet secure, they will use a password.
A strong, complex password is the right choice as it is significantly harder to crack then a
simple password.

Background

Passwords have become a key part of our live since the beginning of the digital age. Everything from your social media accounts to your bank account is password protected. Due to all of the data passwords protect, criminals have tried to crack these passwords to harm their victims. To crack passwords, hackers often use surprisingly low tech techniques such as social engineering, where the hacker just asks for the password, shoulder surfing, where the hacker goes from shoulder to shoulder watching people login, or simply just making educated guesses. To automate the process of hacking passwords, hackers use programs that are designed to guess passwords for them. These programs test random combinations of characters as well as the most commonly used passwords with the hopes of getting the password correct, and getting into the user’s account. To protect our personal information, the common idea is to use a strong password, but what is a strong password?A strong password is a password that uses a wide variety of characters such as letters and numbers, has no information that is personal to you, and is unique. But is that truly the case?

Materials

To do this exprement you will need:
A computer running Windows 10,
An MD5 password encryptor,
The Hashcat password cracker,
A timer,
A Pencil and Notebook
rockyou.txt password list

Conclusion

The experement showes that my hypothesis and common knowlage are correct, strong passwords are harder to crack than easy ones. As The passwords got more complex, the password cracker had a harder time cracking them. This was shown by the fact that it took longer for the complex passwords to be cracked, if they were even cracked within the time limit at all. The experement had a few minor hiccups, most of them steming from me having the wrong version of Hasshcat, or failing to type in command lines.

Methods

Turn on the Computer
Create a text document called Hashes
come up with passwords they can be as common or random as you want. 15 must be 5 chacracers long, 5 of them must use letters only, 5 must use numbers only, and 5 must use numbers and letters. 15 must be 10 characters long,5 of them must use letters only, 5 must use numbers only, and 5 must use numbers and letters. write them down in the noterbook
Enter the 15 5 character long passwords in to the MD5 encryptor, one at a time, and take tha hashes it puts out in the Hashes.txt file
Open up Hashcat using Windows Powershell and set it to crack MD5 and do a prince attack on the Hashes.txt file with the password list rockyou.txt
Run Hashcat and start the timer, let it run for 5 Minutes and record the time it takes to crack each password
At the end of the five minute time limit, record all of the uncracked passwords as uncracked and record the average of the time it took for the passwords that were cracked to be cracked
Repeat steps 4-7 for the 10 character long passwords